Pages

As a kid I would visit London once a
year.Leaving in the dark of a Friday
evening and returning in the similar gloom of Sunday afternoon.Always in the winter, always in a coach
packed to the brim with bags and boy scouts.We would sleep in loose friendship groups on the floor of a large hall
and eat at long shared tables.On
Saturday afternoon, most of the other kids when to watch a game – Arsenal,
Spurs, maybe even Chelsea.In those days
Division One was the highest league, and most games were still played on a
Saturday. Later we would play five-a-side deep into the evening in a building,
which for want of money had a roof, but no walls, and as a result was called
The Lid.I joined in under a kind of
resigned sufferance.

Given the chance I played solitaire.Card after card.Hand after hand.Today, such behaviour would be labelled odd,
and intervention or diagnosis would follow.

But I did not go to London for the company,
the prospect of a cooked breakfast or the sport.I went to go to the Museums.South Kensington for Natural History and
Science, further afield for the Imperial War Museum. It never occurred to me that I would not go to
London again next year, and it never occurred to me to go anywhere but the
museums.

I would be dropped off at the front door in
the middle of the morning and told to be back there at a set time in the
afternoon.I never remember having
company.I never remember having a
watch.I never remember missing the
afternoon pick up.Today, such treatment
of a child would be labelled odd, and intervention or prosecution would
follow.

But in the years that followed something
changed.And London – but not the
museums – lost its pull. Somewhere along the line London shifted from being a
point of interest, to being a point of departure.I went to London to catch planes to
elsewhere, and said – with a confidence that was not based on experience – that
I did not really like the place.That it
was too big, too crowded.That it stood
for the things that I did not – money, privilege, power based on might rather
than right.That it was a place that
sought to impose its own will over the rest of a country that did not always
see eye to eye with its values and morals.

I went from enraptured wandering to arms
length rejection.And now I was going
back.

No amount of seat-back entertainment or
foil wrapped food can soften the impact of 24 hours of economy class
flying.Relaxed kids and good company
help, but you still awake from what passes for sleep and think – Apocalypse Now
like – “Shit, I’m still in seat 48C”.When you try to convince yourself that having only eight hours to go – a
full working day – is a point of celebration, you know that the flight is long
and the destination distant.I flash an
“OK?” question sign at the kids and they reply in kind.Everybody is too tired to speak.Everybody just wants to arrive in London.

Capital

Even when a stranger is holding it up, the
sight of your own name on a board is a welcome relief after a long trip.And one of the advantages of not having a
work a day surname is that there is unlikely to be much confusion about whom
the sign is for.

In a delightfully short time we are being
driven away from the airport and towards Hampstead.I have no idea in what direction we are
moving.I have no real idea what time it
is.Many of the houses by the road look
old and grey, clad in cement wash and decorated with satellite dishes.There are few green gardens, but the cars parked
outside are new and shiny and expensive.Shopping trollies, stolen and lost.The scattered wreckage of take-away meals. London seems to be living up
to my expectations.

I know that no city shows its best face
near the airport – but there are few things more comforting than evidence for
your own misconceptions.

But then things start to change.Trees.Bushes.Weedy patches with
butterflies.The untidiness of neglect
morphs into the chaos of the untamed.This is a complete surprise.Urban roads look like country lanes.The first of what would be many, many woodpigeons walks by the roadside,
blue grey with a clergyman’s collar, and a noisy wingclap launch.The green does not last long, and soon we
turn into Hampstead High Street, with its shops and traffic. But just beyond
the shops and pubs, the well polished cars and white errand vans, is something
I did not expect to be there.A green face
in the grey.A heath for health.A place to explore.But first I need a cup of tea and some time
to stand rather than sit.As ever, we
look in cupboards and under beds, the kids narrowly avoid armed conflict about
who gets which bed; we settle in.It’s a
long time until we can go to sleep, even if my body says otherwise.

Its time to go outside.

The world through the window of the taxi
from the airport had looked both familiar and strange, a confusing sensation of
memory and discovery.But it was a
sensation that was buffered by technology, mediated by the glass and air
con.But now I was outside and
everything came through unfiltered.A
sound and sightscape so immediately and remarkably familiar that it was like I
had been here before, even though I was a stranger.

Each little sound and sight melded
together. A kind of sensory flow that was as enjoyable as it was
startling.It was like tuning back in to
a radio station that had been a favourite – the unchanging channel on the car
radio – but one that had slowly faded over the years.Faded until all you had left was a kind of
highlights reel of things that could be remembered for what they were, but not
recalled for how they sounded.There
were sounds that you knew you had known, but now had to be recalled. In the
past they would have been head front and centre and named with certainty, so
familiar that I would have known and named them without even knowing I was
doing it.The kind of background check
that concentrates on things that sound misplaced.Now everything sounded misplaced, everything
clamoured for my attention.And
strangely, it sounded quite loud.At
times it had the same feeling as that “tip of the tongue” word that you are
sure you know, but just won’t come.Not
the cheeping of sparrows that had followed me to Australia, but the call of
birds like Blue Tits and Great Tits, which I had not heard for years.The complex, silver whistles of warblers,
brief and uncertain at the height of summer.I had an urge to name the sounds, to call out the bird, but I also felt
restrained by the knowledge that I was not longer sure.Each call was a dilemma; a point of
uncertainty that reinforced that this was only a kind of homecoming, not a
complete return, and not a visit to somewhere new.

We walked away from the traffic noise of
high street towards the Heath – down roads that met at strange angles and had
names that probably once meant something.The network of streets and lanes was unplanned, but still strangely
logical.Cut-throughs between places
made sense, you could get to where you could see along roads that were probably
older than the houses that lined them.The network had been walked by feet long before the words “town” and
“planning” had been morphed together into a kind of urban confusion.There were street trees that may have been
planted before the country I now live in gained a formal name and a debated
constitution.

As I walk off the hard road and on to the
softer soil of the heath I am overwhelmed by green.It felt like a sudden rush of spring, impossibly
swift after the winter of Australia.Long
leafy avenues stretched away from the gates, the light soft and welcoming.The edges of the paths are flecked with moss.Even the surfaces of the ponds are capped
with duckweed.It’s green as far as the
eye can see.

But how can this be?I am still in London.How can there be places like this in a town I
knew to be nothing but grey and unfriendly?I have been home (if that is what it is) for less than four hours and
already things that I had known have had to be unlearned.Things that I have held to be true have turned
out to be false.

A butterfly waits, spread-winged on a
thistle.A robin, cautious in the
shadows, waits below a green wooden bench.A cormorant fluttering its neck, waits for the cool of the evening.I seem not to be the only one taking
stock.

A jay shrieks – unmistakable even after all
these years – from an oak tree.A
nuthatch calls in its explosive pop.The
radio station from earlier times tunes and settles.Memory unfolds.I start to find things to show the kids.The kids start to find things to show
me.I still have 28 days to go.I still have a long time to remember what I
thought I had forgotten.

In the darkness below a beech tree a
squirrel moves from stance to stance.Rapid, fluid, comical.My kids
stand and stare and, lacking all woodcraft, run after it.The squirrel takes refuge in a tree but is
soon replaced by two more.Then a
third.The kids move slower, the
squirrels just as fast. The kids stand
still and the squirrels remain.The
whole family stands and watches, caught in the first day novelty.To many – maybe most – they are just despised
greys, an import that has grown to the status of vermin.But they are still squirrels.They are still the epitome of
distraction.We watch until they leave,
rushing through the fingered undergrowth of hazel.

As the squirrels run off, my kids join then, searching of things
un-Australian. I laugh at the connection between the squirrel and me. They are neither old enough to be native nor fleeting
enough to be a visitor, they are a strange combination of both.I begin to understand how that feels.

The descent to the platform of Hampstead
tube station is the longest and deepest in London.Once you are down there a notice tells you
not to take the stairs back up, lest the 15-story climb proves too much.You don’t want to come out of the tube in a
box.The tiled floors and filigree metal
work speak of a time when there was a concern for both utility and aesthetics;
people may have died of hunger and diseases that today would only cause slight
concern, but the railways looked good.

I hum a tune.“Victorian tunnels..... moss oozes from the
pores....dull echoes”.The train arrives
with a rush of air, smelling of oil, stale and warm.The faces bluring in the passing windows regain
a recognisable symmetry as the train slows.In the cabin people talk to their traveling companions.The single and lonely don’t speak at all;
they arrive at their destination silent and unacknowledged.There is little to be seen from the windows except
rippled blackness.Even though I know
it’s not, the tube tunnels could be huge. We slide along, the human cargo in
the barrel a transport syringe.

We arrive
at our destination, are tempted by chocolate, and walk towards light.Busker music filters from an unseen part of
the station, people talk on their phones: deals, arrangements, gossip.Few people know we are here; fewer people in
the crowds notice us – just faces in a sea of other faces.For reasons that defy logic I expect to meet
somebody I know.

While there
are far fewer pigeons than I had expected, the unfinished corner of Trafalgar
Square is marked with a large blue cockerel. The pigeons seem to have been replaced by
crocodile lines of school kids wearing high visibility waistcoats, shepherded
by collie dog teachers, snapping at the heels of stragglers, bags full of
asthma puffers and medical release forms. It’s a thankless task – criticized as
unadventurous by those who survived the benign neglect of former years and undervalued
by those who have never sat on the hard side of the teacher’s desk.An independent soul in a porkpie hat eats his
apple by a statue.Double-decker buses,
black taxis, unarmed policemen.I don’t
know who is seeing more that makes them smile – me or the kids.Like a million other people they climb on the
lions and smile for the camera.I don’t
climb, but I do smile.It’s not memory
that I experience, but it feels like it ought to be.Too many pictures by other people for this to
feel fully new, too many TV shows, too many icons stacked one on top of each
other.To my own surprise I find that I like
London.Wonders never cease.

It is hot
and the flags hang limp, barely moving.A large blue fly bothers the nostril of a guard’s horse.Armed police stand by an impressive metal
gate.Such a thing would go unnoticed in
some places, but in the UK, machine guns on the street are still the exception
rather than the rule.

We walk
along straight streets, past memorials that urge us never to forget, towards
the Houses of Parliament, towards the seat of a government I am glad to no
longer call my own.It seems that the
Mother of Parliament’s is content to neglect many of its children. I feel uninvolved in the passion that others
feel, but I know full well that the same thing is happening at home, where the
poor do not drive cars and the desperate are sent back out to sea in orange lifeboats.What have we all done to deserve these
people?

At the end
of the road the two great symbols of state watch each other across a busy round
about – the Palace of Westminster and its Abbey.On one side of the road the living control
the day-to-day lives of the nation, and on the other side the dead hold sway
over its myths.So many of the great and
the good (or maybe not) have moved from one side to the other and still manage
to control the destiny of the living they have left behind.A statue of Churchill, stoop-shouldered and
heavy, looks towards the tower of Big Ben.A great leader, a powerful man, a man removed from power by the will of
the people, sick of war and wanting a new start; the third part of this legacy
so often overlooked.Round and round the
buses go, different I’m sure, but always looking the same.People wait for an election, but the buses still
look the same.

We take
shelter from the sun – who would have thought – in a park near the Queen’s London
house.People in new suits and
uncomfortable looking shoes leave by one gate while people with automatic
weapons guard another.Clearly and justifiably
some guests are more welcome than others.

A squirrel
rushes from its hiding place in the long grass and seeks shelter in a
sycamore.Comfortable in its ancestral
home, it pauses its run to look at us.

The light
stumbles and trips through the leaves of the sycamore tree.Maple leaves, so similar to the ones above
us, are set below a sheen of flowing water.The dead of Canada – including three troopers that died in a town that
almost bears my name – are remembered in a sloping memorial that some children
play on.I’m not sure if this is
inadvertent disrespect or an expression of the freedom that sacrifice
brings.I’m saddened by the thought of
the first, and wonder if this is the best place to celebrate the second.

We seem to
be surrounded by power and memory; a potent mixture for sure.

The next
day we head for the Museums.If memories
are to be conjured anywhere it will be here, in these often visited
buildings.But we enter by the back
door, and nothing looks familiar.Too
many renovations, too much change.But
thankfully, no reduction in wonder.Even
the opening displays hold me; huge crystals, ancient plants, fossils of animals
so strange and otherworldly. These are traditional displays, static and rich
with labels – where, when, what and why.The building blocks of knowledge and understanding, unadorned with bells
and whistles.My kids stop to look as
well: it must be some kind of inheritance.

Brief
exploration leads to places I recall.Huge reptile dolphins, won from the rocks of Dorset by a lady in a
crinoline dress, hang as panels on a corridor wall.A statue of Darwin looking out over the main
entrance, where a huge dinosaur stands to challenge the myth of unchanging
creation.The whole Natural History
Museum really just an inventory of the way one idea can change the way we know
the world.An idea that is so simple and
elegant that some people still find it hard to grasp, and campaign to have it
struck from the record.The truth should
set us free, even if the heavens may fall as well. In slow moving crowds,
surrounded by dinosaurs, in galleries packed with the unending variety of
insects and in an empty space shared with the bones of humans long gone and
strangely different, the connection between them and us – nature and humanity –
slips away.There are human stories on
both sides of the glass in this museum.I just wish more people understood why.

In the
museum I meet a fellow blogger.It seems
strange to recognise a stranger I have never met, but a stranger with whom I
have had many Internet fractured conversations.She knows a good place for tea.Always follow local advice.That
evening I meet an old school friend.It
seems strange to instantly recognise a face I have not seen for half a lifetime.25 years of stories, punctuated with pints
and a bar meal.Scrabbling to catch up
on things we had missed, scrabbling to restring the bonds that tie.

These are
not the only, nor the least of the strange collisions that make up the days
here.Prejudice against evidence.Fiction against fact.The present against the past.

We see
towers packed with jewels, guarded by ravens.We straddle the line where the world divides and drink tea below a
copper-bottomed tea clipper.

The days
are warm, and the nights feel hot.Dawn
brings slight cool breezes and the screams of swifts.

I’ve
reached a kind of home and a kind of holiday.Next month seems very far away and that feels good.